Language is a loop: I can only say that language doesn’t describe anything by using language to say that it doesn’t describe anything. That’s a perpetual loop.
Language can give vague ideas about things and that’s all. Try to use it for truth and you’re caught in a loop.
And yet… language works. What’s cool about being a human is that I can use language to describe an idea to you that you can kind of understand the idea I’m passing. Especially if we are doing something together.
Say we’re cooking a dinner, and I’m like, “You need to add a teaspoon of salt to that,” and you’re like, “Oh, you’re right, it doesn’t taste very good,” and you walk over and you get a teaspoon and you measure it out carefully and you add a teaspoon to it.
That’s a miracle really. I just had an idea, passed it on to you, and you did it. Language is great for that. I was able to take an undefined idea—I tasted the soup, it’s not quite right, I’m like, “It could use a little salt,”
I know that it needs salt from experience, right? The knowing itself is not the words “it needs a little salt”. I simply know, “Oh, it needs a little salt.” I look at you, “Hey, it needs a little salt, it could use a teaspoon,” and you’re like, “Oh yeah.” You go over, you get a teaspoon, you put it in. Language does this very, very well, and really, it’s a miracle that I’m able to take that vague thought and turn it into you and it becomes action. Boom, now we have soup that tastes good.
But the language, isolated by itself, is totally limited. Like, if you didn’t know what a teaspoon was, I wouldn’t have been able to say that sentence to you, and it wouldn’t have made any sense. If you didn’t know English, we wouldn’t have been able to convey these ideas to each other.
But language is not exactly the thing. You could do it without language. We’re standing there, I taste the soup, and I make a face and go “yuck.” I look at you, hand you a teaspoon, point to the salt, and nod—you take the teaspoon add salt to the soup. We literally could have done the exact same thing without a single word.
Language is just a tool. It’s not the thing itself. It’s the idea and the person who’s having the idea, that really matters.
So the trick is to start seeing language as not the thing. That’s exactly what nonduality is saying. Language is not the thing. Every thought that you have is not actually the thing that it’s describing.
Nonduality is about enlightenment and finding ourselves. You are not the thing that you are looking for. You are who is looking.